Current vehicle safety systems are often designed to continuously monitor the environment of a vehicle and to report on objects which are detected by said systems in the environment of the vehicle. In this case, such objects are usually described in terms of their kinematic state (for example position and speed).
In order to assist the driver, it is necessary in this case to distinguish between critical situations and normal or non-critical situations. In order to be able to assess the collision danger posed by an object in the environment of the vehicle, it is necessary to quantify this danger, in which case a quantitative value determined in this case is referred to as a degree of danger, for example. Different approaches are known for the purpose of determining this degree of danger. With respect to the prior art, reference is made only by way of example to US 2005/0090955A1, DE 10 2009 006 747 A1, EP 1 873 737 B1, DE 199 54 536 B4, DE 10 2005 046 841 A1, US 2011/0178710 A1 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,437,890 B2.
A problem which arises when quantifying the collision danger posed by an object in the environment of a vehicle by means of a degree of danger is that it may be difficult to define a suitable threshold value for the degree of danger, upon the exceeding of which a warning signal and/or active intervention by the safety system must be effected. In extreme cases for example, the degree of danger may still remain at a low value for a relatively long period of time while approaching an object or obstacle and may only increase to a significant value immediately before the collision, in which case it may then already be too late to assist the driver and/or activate a collision warning system or avoid or mitigate a collision.